The way home

“You’re a runner,” she said, meaning I use my bike to escape things I don’t want to feel. She had a point.

But the opposite is also true. Sometimes I don’t know I’m feeling anything until I’m 12 miles out and have sloughed off the carapace that accumulates when I’m stationary, indoors, or around people.

My Twitter stream sounds like I’m constantly running errands. Like everyone’s, my daily life entails lots of little missions. But I also have a habit of lining up bike errands for myself nearly every day so I have an excuse to get on the bike.

The cat was out of wet food today (thank you, Cat!), so I rode out into a typical November day – rainy and cool. I started to go the most direct route…and then turned around. When I get the detouring instinct, I try to follow what it’s telling me, because it knows what I need better than I do, and that’s not necessarily cat food (though I did buy that, because: Cat). As I looped through one neighborhood, and another, and another (neighborhoods here are wee), the day began to be beautiful. I don’t mean that the sun came out. I mean that mine did.

Over a golden carpet of heart-shaped leaves, through rows of rosy trees, and do you know how many different colors grey can be? You do if you live in the Pacific Northwest. They are all bewitching: bluish, purplish, like so many dove-wings hanging above you.

Rain falling on my nose, delicious.

Yesterday I’d gone for a long ride, one of those times when I don’t even pretend to be riding for a purpose, other than because I need to. I rode the bike that’s a part of me, as if we are a bird together. It’s the one I keep in the house, because it might be made of a piece of my heart. It’s steel.

For the first hour I was angry, tangled like some tough old cocoon. When I got to the farm just outside of Gresham and looked at the lambs, their little legs dark in the mud, a dream I’d had that morning came to me:

I had wings, but they were ugly, made of flesh, and only half-grown. I hadn’t even known they were there.

And then I was crying a bit, on the bike. It used to be I could only cry while riding through the park at night alone.

In that moment I understood that my wings were stunted because I’d been told they were something to be ashamed of. That was why they’d been hiding there all this time, half-grown against my back.

I rode 20 more miles then, through the hobo camps along the Springwater at dusk (ride fast, dodge but don’t stop), turned on my light, listened to the geese. At one point I thought a bike was coming up to pass, but it was the wind.

Stopped at the grocery store (sometimes the non-errand rides get errands thrown in). Carried a half-gallon of milk on my back. Fed the cat.

I’m not always home when I’m in my house, but if I ride I usually arrive at myself.

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “The way home”

Wow. Just discovered your blog via a Google + share. I grew up in western Oregon and now live in equally damp, “50 shades of grey” (ha!) heartbreakingly beautiful rural England. You’ve made me homesick. Very well written. -:)